World's 22 largest building vacant--and could be forever.

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I'm Biv Dick Black, the Over Poster.

It's the Ryugyong Hotel in North Korea, where the world's 22nd largest skyscraper has been vacant for two decades and is likely to stay that way ... forever.
By Eva Hagberg
1/28/2008, 6:57 AM

Cavit Erginsoy​

A picture doesn't lie -- the one-hundred-and-five-story Ryugyong Hotel is hideous, dominating the Pyongyang skyline like some twisted North Korean version of Cinderella's castle. Not that you would be able to tell from the official government photos of the North Korean capital -- the hotel is such an eyesore, the Communist regime routinely covers it up, airbrushing it to make it look like it's open -- or Photoshopping or cropping it out of pictures completely.
Even by Communist standards, the 3,000-room hotel is hideously ugly, a series of three gray 328-foot long concrete wings shaped into a steep pyramid. With 75 degree sides that rise to an apex of 1,083 feet, the Hotel of Doom (also known as the Phantom Hotel and the Phantom Pyramid) isn't the just the worst designed building in the world -- it's the worst-built building, too. In 1987, Baikdoosan Architects and Engineers put its first shovel into the ground and more than twenty years later, after North Korea poured more than two percent of its gross domestic product to building this monster, the hotel remains unoccupied, unopened, and unfinished.

Internet Trendsetter OMG HI

Banned

Because the country with the least amount of tourism in the world obviously needs the largest hotel in the world. Kim Jong Il definitely lets me know our stupidity in this country could be a lot worse.

Supreme Champion!!!!!

Because the country with the least amount of tourism in the world obviously needs the largest hotel in the world. Kim Jong Il definitely lets me know our stupidity in this country could be a lot worse.

Registered User

Bastard coated bastard w/ bastard filling

Substandard concrete throughout-- they got to the point in construction that you see now and realized that the concrete was so shitty that the building would collapse under its own weight if they continued.

I notice that Wikipedia's entry on this has been scrubbed of that little detail, instead blaming the halt in construction on the evil West.

Registered User

if the concrete is so shitty, how is the thing still standing? wind and the storms it had to withstand over the last twenty years make it more stable than they thought. there is only like 3 percent left to finish anyway. wtf these people are just as fucked up as we thought they were

gorgeousness and gorgeousity made flesh

They pissed $750 million dollars (a full 2% of their total GDP) into building this monstrosity while millions of their citizens died of starvation, and to this day the place is still just a shell. It was never completed. It never opened. It never hosted a single guest.

The North Korean government has taken to making believe that the hulking embarrassment just plain 'ol doesn't exist. They have stricken it from maps of the city, and it's name and address are no longer listed in any phonebook or directory. The citizens of Pyongyang are expected to go about their lives pretending this monstrosity of a building is invisible:

They don't point at it, they don't use it as a landmark when they give directions, they don't take pictures of it, they don't even mention it's name in public.

"What big pyramid?" They'll say if you ask about the hulking monstrosity which dominates the skyline.